August 2007

KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Aug 30 (Tanjug) - Goran Grujicic, a Serb resident of the Dren village in the Zubin Potok municipality in Kosovo-Metohija, was abducted early Wednesday by armed and masked men wearing uniforms with Albanian National Army insignia.

Grujicic was intercepted by three vehicles and dragged out of his car to a house in the Zac village, but managed to escape into the woods through a window, the Serb National Council of northern Kosovo (SNV) said in a release.

Grujicic managed to contact his relatives by mobile phone to get help.

I hope he doesn’t get in trouble with the international authorities for escaping.

Vukosava Ivanovic, who lives in the huts behind the stadium in the center of Pristina, was beaten up shortly after 5 p.m. in front of the door of her residence. Neighbor Zivka Lukic says that Vukosava was hurt, and that this was done by their neighbor, an 18 year-old young man, who hit Vukosava in the head and thus broke her nose. Zivka immediately reported the incident to the Kosovo Police Service.

“A young man, a neighbor, hit Vukosava in the nose several times. I called the police, they came and called the ambulance which took her to the hospital. There was blood all over the place,” said Lukic.

“Vukosava Ivanovic, born in 1933, was beaten up today at about 5:00 p.m. Her nose was broken but she is not in life-threatening danger. The suspect in this attack is an eighteen year-old young man, Vukosava’s neighbor…The motive for the attack is presently not known,” said Elshani.

In 2002, Muslim World Council (aka Rabita), a proselytizing tool of the Saudi state that has a ponderous influence in the Organization of Islamic Conference, has officially designated Jews and Serbs as enemies of Islam.

“[A]ccording to the Islamic Fiqh Council, there are various forms of terrorism, which include state terrorism, the most conspicuous illustration and the most heinous of which is practiced in Palestine today by the Israelis, and by the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo,” writes Muslim World League Journal in its July 2002 issue.

Both Serbia and Israel did not need this official Islamic designation to realize that an active Islamic conspiracy is seeking to exterminate them, because policies practiced on [Israel and Serbia] are nearly identical.

“The communiqué called on the Chairman of the Jerusalem Committee, member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and other Islamic and international commissions to take the necessary measures to put pressure on the Zionists to halt the judaization of Jerusalem, prevent the occurrence of any geographical or demographic change, remove all Jewish settlements from the occupied territories…”

On Serbs:

“The communiqué urged OIC member states to exert efforts to help the Muslims in Kosovo to gain their right for self-determination and establish their independent state, and to seek to put pressure on the Serbs to recognize that demand and provide all assistance to the Kosovan Muslims.”

In fact, just yesterday, [the] Muslim “president” in Kosovo went public telling Serbs to give up on Kosovo. “It is important for Belgrade to understand that it is surely easier for them to give up their claim, once and for all,” said Muslim Sejdiu.

The Islamiane Amanpour is then just another in a long procession of useful media idiots that perpetuate a myth that a way for America to get along with the Muslim world is to inflict tangible pain on Jews and Serbs.

I fortuitously just stumbled upon one of thousands of pieces of additional confirmation that Western policies have been shadowing Islamic ones, in Chris Deliso’s excellent book The Coming Balkan Caliphate:

The Clinton administration’s support for the foreign mujahedin in Bosnia…opened a vital window of opportunity for Islamic terrorist organizations to deepen and diversify their operations in all of Europe — directly expediting the 9/11 attacks and the 2004 Madrid bombing. The Bosnian support was allegedly necessary to prevent a “Greater Serbia.” However, “what the West seems to have forgotten,” states [security expert] Darko Trifunovic, “is that long before the [2001] terrorist attacks against America, the Bosnian Serbs were fighting against jihad, a literal jihad ordered and funded by Osama bin Laden, in their own country. Former mujahedin have told me that bin Laden personally ordered them to fight Christians in the Balkans — and later, to expand in Europe, especially Italy and Spain. The West is now paying the price for supporting the mujahedin against the Serbs.”

Incidentally, the Serbs, even under Milosevic, were not trying to create a Greater Serbia.

Ms. Amanpour reserves her most naked disdain for the settlers’ U.S. supporters, such as Shani and Dov Hikind, who fundraise to build parks and endow schools. Presented as “The Power Couple,” shots of them posing for photos and dancing are accompanied by Ms. Amanpour’s narration, “6,000 miles from Israel’s settlements, in the heart of Manhattan, defiance of international law comes dressed in diamonds. … Here Shani and Dov Hikind, two of God’s Jewish American warriors, are a whirlwind of shmooze…For the Hikinds … house hunting in the occupied territories is more than a real estate investment.”

The rich-Jew stereotypes were the least of Amanpour’s latest journalistic crimes. In addition to showcasing Carter’s anti-Semitic tract that led to the protest resignations of 14 of the Carter Center board’s Dumb Jews who didn’t figure Carter out until this book, Robinson writes:

[H]er real venom is reserved for Jewish settlers on the West Bank and their supporters…who are depicted as lawbreakers and wreckers of world traquility…Since a significant portion of the segment is devoted to Jewish terrorism, one could get the impression that it is somewhat common, instead of a freakishly rare phenomenon that, when it occurs, is almost universally condemned by Jews worldwide.
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Surely she would never depict Arab-Americans who care about ordinary Palestinians as a unified bloc of terror-supporters. So why does she depict settlers and their supporters as a bloc of people who undermine world peace?

Now recall the criticism earlier this year of Wesley Clark’s references to “New York money people” influencing American policy on Iran. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Surprised that Wesley Clark is against bombing a terrorist regime in Iran and is blaming the Jews for a military response being a real possibility? Too bad no one paid attention when Clark’s ethnic target was the Serbs…if the Jews are the canary in the mine, the Serbs have been the canary’s canary.

Working to ensure a mono-ethnic Kosovo, Clark warned that “a violent collision may occur by year-end” if we don’t give the Albanians what they want (independence without standards ala Palestine). And this four-star general advocated doing just that.

Similarly, Judeophobe Amanpour demonstrated her propensity for journalism that borders on the criminal early on at the expense of the Serbs, when she hauled her manly butt to the Balkans at first opportunity — and was among the first to plant the image of the “genocidal Serb” in the public mind while shilling for Bosnia’s fundamentalist agenda and Croatia’s Nazi revivalism. As Balkans author Bill Dorich writes:

“CNN’s Ms. Amanpour was at the top of the list of those correspondents who parked their backsides at the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo and relied on Muslim runners to collect the data for their stories. Nearly all journalists who went to Bosnia could not communicate in the language of the country and the vast majority relied on Muslim translators for their so-called facts.

This is vividly demonstrated, along with Amanpour’s crimes against humanity in the Balkans, in Peter Brock’s book Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting. When it was time for the West’s Kosovo leg of Serb slaughter, Amanpour befriended Muslim-Albanian terrorist and current Western-backed leader Hashim Thaci.

Describing the reporting of Christi[a]ne Amanpour and others on a battle around Goradze [Gorazde], U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Sray wrote back in October 1995 that these news reports “were devoid of any semblance of truth,” that Americans were suffering from “a cornucopia of disinformation,”…and that popular perceptions of Bosnia “have been forged by a prolific propaganda machine..[that has] managed to manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals.”

A 1994 article in the New York Times Magazine by Stephen Kinzer quotes a longtime TV associate of Ms. Amanpour:

“I have winced at some of what she’s done, at what used to be called advocacy journalism,” he said. “She was sitting in Belgrade when that marketplace massacre happened, and she went on the air to say that the Serbs had probably done it. There was no way she could have known that. She was assuming an omniscience which no journalist has.”

The magazine quote comes by way of a 1999 commentary by Stella Jatras in the Washington Times, which goes on to read:

The fact that a U.N. classified report concluded that Bosnian Muslim forces had committed the Markale marketplace massacre seems of no consequence to Ms. Amanpour. Deutsche Presse-Agentur of June 6, 1996, wrote: “For the first time, a senior U.N. official had admitted the existence of a secret U.N. report that blames the Bosnian Muslims for the Feb. 1994 massacre of Muslims at the Sarajevo market.”

Christiane Amanpour has yet to inform her viewers of this fact, but continues to allow them to believe the massacre was a Serbian atrocity which United States and NATO used as an excuse to drop more than 6,000 tons of bombs on the Bosnian Serbs.
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Another big CNN story early in the Bosnian conflict was the killing, allegedly by Serb snipers of two “Muslim babies” on a bus. Who could not have been horrified by the tragic sight of the funeral service for those innocent Muslim babies? Where were Ms. Amanpour and CNN to set the record straight? If it had not been for French 2 TV that covered the funeral, this writer would never have known that the babies were Serbian (not Muslim) killed by a Muslim sniper, as was made painfully clear by the presence of a Serbian Orthodox priest conducting the funeral service. . . before it was interrupted by a grenade attack. However, in the CNN coverage the priest had been cropped out, leaving the American audience to believe that Serbs were not only the assassins, but were also responsible for the grenade attack.

But there’s a third prominent individual worth mentioning, another proud member of the Serbo-Judeo-Phobia Club. He is former British MP Lord Jeremy “Paddy” Ashdown, whose documentary “Battle for the Holy Land - Jerusalem” aired in May on British Channel 4. Here’s what commentator Carol Gould had to say about it:

Had I known nothing or even very little about Jewish, Zionist and Israeli history I would have come away from former MP Paddy Ashdown’s two-hour documentary on British Channel Four’s primetime Saturday slot thinking the Jews are just about the most disagreeable race on this planet. Were I an Arab or Muslim I would believe the Jews of the Holy City are the scum of the earth.

In this film he managed to label the Jewish authorities of Jerusalem ‘racism masquerading as bureaucracy,’ ‘discriminatory and inhumane’ and ‘waging a forty-year war over the Haram al Sharif.’

Once again a British television programme has taken the complex and tragic story of Israel and turned it into a polemic about the endlessly victimised Palestinians and those brutal, hate-filled, despicable Jews….

As Israel watchers may or may not know, Ashdown was the UN High Representative overseeing Bosnia from 2003 to 2005, during which he worked toward wiping Bosnia’s Serb Republic off the map. Like Israel, which is surrounded by monstrosities that pass for states, “Republica Srpska is the only part of Bosnia-Herzegovina where the rule of law applies, and where there is productivity, ethnic and religious tolerance,” as Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily put it in 2004.

In an interview in the International Herald Tribune Ashdown compares the administration of peace in Bosnia to the occupation of Germany and Japan after 1945…Ashdown thus compares the Serbs (who were our allies against German Imperialism and European fascism in two world wars) with the Nazis. He equates the Bosnians, Croatians and Albanians (who were fascist and Nazi allies) with peace loving democracies!…Most dangerous of all…Ashdown sees Muslim revolutionary fanaticism as the vanguard of democratic nationhood and world peace! No wonder he and his ignorant British and American sponsors have ushered into Europe via Albania and Kosovo some of the most dangerous and violent Islamic movements in history.

“This country [Bosnia] is about history, and unless the Serbs in particular — although terrible things were done by the Bosniaks and Croats too — come to some understanding of this history, we cannot build a stable state. The major burden of guilt is on them, and they have to acknowledge it, just as the Germans acknowledged it.”

Creation of “a stable state” in Bosnia depends on the Serbs accepting their assigned role as Nazis. That the “Bosniaks” and Croats were the actual Nazis, back in WWII, is the kind of history that does not interest Ashdown.

He gave evidence about his four day visit to Kosovo in 1998 and claimed he was a witness to atrocities allegedly carried out by the Yugoslav Army. He claimed he had witnessed these events from a position above the village of Gegaj in Albania overlooking Kosovo. But when he was told that from his observation point it was impossible to observe the area he claimed, he changed his story and said in fact he was somewhere else!

After it was proved in court that Ashdown could not possibly have seen anything from the position he had previously claimed, above the Albanian village of Gegaj, he supplied the court with grid co-ordinates different from his original testimony, and these new co-ordinates put him inside Kosovo and not in Albania…Moreover, on the map the prosecution supplied to try and verify Ashdown’s testimony the village of Gegaj had been moved! When challenged on this point the prosecution reluctantly admitted it may be a faulty map!

At the October, 2003 funeral of wartime Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic — who in his youth had been a recruiter for the Waffen SS; who asked to be buried “with the martyrs”; and who wrote that “there can be no peace or coexistence between ‘the Islamic faith’ and non-Islamic social and political institutions” — Ashdown eulogized:

He became the father of his people — the person who did more than any other to ensure the survival of the modern state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Ashdown gazing out onto his handiwork in Bosnia from his lakeside home, a minaret visible in the distance.

Ashdown overlooking the Holy Land, the Islamic Dome of the Rock visible in the distance.

The Jewish state’s Western enemies have a history of enmity toward the Serbs. If they’re not already doing so, Israel watchers must pay close attention to what has happened, and continues to happen, to the Serbs — and choose sides.

“View from Israel,” American Legion Magazine, October 1999, by Cliff Kincaid:

While Washington and NATO saw Kosovo as a symbol of Serb oppression, a top Israeli journalist says European diplomats and defense experts have “privately and quietly” begun to take note of a deep Iranian connection to the conflict. Steve Rodan, a former staff correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, says Iran and other Islamic nations have funded and armed the Kosovo Liberation Army because they want to create a Muslim bloc of nations, including an independent Kosovo, Albania and Bosnia, throughout Europe.

What’s worse, he says that Osama bin Laden, blamed for the terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, has a working relationship with the KLA. If the KLA takes firm control in Kosovo, he warns bin Laden “can move his people, equipment and even his reported weapons of mass destruction throughout Central Europe.”

Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro is tipping Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to team up and win the U.S. presidential election.
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“The word today is that an apparently unbeatable ticket could be Hillary for president and Obama as her running mate,” he wrote in an editorial column on U.S. presidents published on Tuesday by Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper, Granma.

This reminds me of the 2004 election, when Yassir Arafat endorsed Kerry-Edwards, and Osama bin Laden assured Americans that states voting for Kerry over Bush wouldn’t be bombed.

How come it never occurs to dictators and terrorists to publicly support Republican candidates, so that their secretly preferred Democratic/Commie candidates could actually stand a chance of winning?

Meanwhile, nothing speaks more loudly about the following two individuals than Castro’s praises:

Castro said former President Bill Clinton was “really kind” when he bumped into him and the two men shook hands at a U.N. summit meeting in 2000. He also praised Clinton for sending elite police to “rescue” shipwrecked Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives in 2000 to end an international custody battle.
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He said his favorite U.S. president since 1959 was Jimmy Carter…

Children in enclaves in Kosovo are the most vulnerable category of beneficiaries of the Serbian Red Cross, an official says.

“The most threatened children are those in the enclaves where children’s rights have been violated for eight years, not just according to human standards, but also according to the Geneva and UN conventions which the international community wrote and adopted itself,” Secretary of the Kosovo Committee of the Serbian Red Cross Dragisa Murganic told Tanjug on Sunday .

Murganic was in Baosici, Montenegro, with a group of 147 children from Kosovo, who are spending their vacation in a Serbian Red Cross holiday home in that seaside resort.

According to him, despite major efforts on the part of the Serbian state, there was a great difference between the lives led by Serbs, especially children, who live in the enclaves and in northern Kosovo, and those inhabiting central Serbia.

“Children in the enclaves have no future, their survival is uncertain. They only have their teacher and the village cafe,” Murganic said and added they had few options to get out of the “constant psychological pressure that results from the life in the enclaves.”

Zarko Zivaljevic, a Serbian refugee from Kosovo, is eagerly awaiting a new round of talks this week on the contested province’s future — hoping it will bring him and his family a step toward closure in an ordeal that has left them in limbo.
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“We will pay the price, we always do,” he said.

Zivaljevic, from Pec in western Kosovo, left with his two brothers, their parents, wives and children, along with about 200,000 Serbs. A few returned later, but most settled in central Serbia with relatives or in refugee camps.

Eight years later, life remains grim. The Zivaljevic family, which had a farm on the outskirts of Pec and an apartment in the town, lives in refugee barracks in a Belgrade suburb.

They say their house in Pec is now inhabited by an ethnic Albanian family. Efforts to reclaim the property have failed…They now live in old, humid concrete buildings that have running water, but no proper bathrooms; makeshift electricity cables hang from the ceilings.
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Vlajinka Ilic, from the eastern Kosovo town of Kosovska Kamenica, says…she also had a house and a farm, but was forced to flee in 2001, amid attacks by revenge-seeking ethnic Albanian extremists. Her eyes filled with tears as she talked about her Kosovo home.

“I would go back immediately, if only they would give me freedom,” Ilic said, explaining she had no freedom of movement in Kosovo because of the threat of violence from ethnic Albanians.
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The refugees at the Resnik camp said they were waiting to see what will happen at negotiations set to resume on Aug. 30 in Vienna, Austria. But, they also say they no longer have any illusions. Stuffed in the barracks, at temperatures of nearly 40 degrees Celsius, the refugees had little interest in the political maneuvering far away from their daily suffering.
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When asked about their past life in Kosovo, refugees said they had good relations with their ethnic Albanian neighbors, and blamed the war on extremists on both sides.

“We are normal people, we can live normally anywhere, only if they’d let us,” says Milenko Zivaljevic, Zarko’s older brother.

Ah, but the West prefers and promotes abnormal people.

About Serbs having had, for the most part, good relations with their Albanian neighbors before the internationals intervened on behalf of the province’s most extreme elements, that is a fact. And the book Hiding Genocide in Kosovo reasserts it. But the book also mentions the following:

The cleansing was remarkably efficient…The remainder, mostly old men and women, were secured behind barbed wire and left there in the centre of the town, exposed to the insults of the UÇK [KLA], to the insults of the civilians who had once been their neighbours and who had turned to be haters of old men and old women…

Some dates go down in military history. This should be one of them. All the heroes who fought for America, for American independence, for American values…all those heroes …where were they that night? Who slept soundly that night? The 1,000 or so old Serbs and Roma who were left, who endured that night, must have wondered what they had done? Or perhaps they wondered, having witnessed what the UÇK and their old neighbours had just perpetrated, perhaps some of them wondered is this the Second World War again? Is this the new order?

The survivors of that ordeal were left to endure being penned behind barbed wire in the open for more than a week with no sanitary facilities, no water and in the fierce heat of the Balkan summer before someone from UNMIK/KFOR chose to rescue them…The residents of Urosevac that were saved after more than a week of life under armed guard open to the gaze of the UÇK and their former neighbours who watched them continuously and who humiliated them continuously with impunity, yes they were saved.

The Albanian neighbor-on-non Albanian-neighbor violence continued into the following year and, as we know, to the present day:

Tanjug, Feb. 2000 — Four Serbs and two Frenchmen were wounded, and a Serb nurse was beaten up in Sunday’s unrests in Kosovska Mitrovica, in an exchange of fire between ethnic Albanians and KFOR French troops…One of the four wounded Serbs, Milos Mitic, was shot from a skyscraper in Kolasinska St. while trying to protect a woman with a child. According to Dr. Jaksic, the nurse, living in the same skyscraper, was beaten up by an Albanian neighbour and kept for treatment in the hospital. She suffered serious head and body injuries inflicted with rifle butt, said the doctor.

One famous quote from Ronald Reagan explains the difference between a Communist and an anti-Communist. “A Communist reads Karl Marx. An anti-Communist understands Karl Marx.” I always applied this quote to Leftists/Liberals in general, since those two things are merely different shades of Communists — and without Republicans around, they always morph into Communists.

I recently had my own experience with Leftists not understanding what they read. You see, for a little while I was blogging my Kosovo stuff at Huffington Post. My ticket in was that the loons there saw the topic’s Bush-bashing potential, so I exploited that to get the news out about Kosovo to as wide an audience as possible.

My most circulated post there was one exposing the slapstick-quality quote by Tom Lantos (echoed by Robert Wexler (D, FL), Eliot Engel and Undersecretary of State Nick Burns) at a House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing in April:

Just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led government[s] in this world that here is yet another example that the United States leads the way for the creation of a predominantly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe. This should be noted by both responsible leaders of Islamic governments, such as Indonesia, and also for jihadists of all color and hue…the United States stands foursquare for the creation of an overwhelmingly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe.

The way I got the precise quote was that after I submitted a paraphrased version of the meeting to Huffington Post (based on notes from sources who attended), an editor there got me the exact transcript from the subscription-only Federal News Service, Inc. Together, then, Huffington Post and I helped Lantos make a fool of himself.

Still, considering that there is a virtual blackout in the press on the subject of the Balkans when done from a non anti-Serb perspective, I was shocked every time Huff Post printed one of my posts on the subject. I wondered when the axe would come down.

In May it finally did, when I got the following email from “managing editor” at the famous blog, Colin Sterling:

Hi Julia,

I’m sorry for the slow response but after digesting the posts I really don’t think this issue is the right fit for the Huffington Post.

many thanks,
colin

But last week Huffington Post printed a blog post by some Richard Shepard, which included the following statement:

…With anti-American sentiment dangerously up, we are in dire need of some good will, based on action rather then [sic] words…America should lead the capture of the man responsible for the murder of more Muslims than anyone in modern history — the most wanted war criminal in the world, Radovan Karadzic.
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Imagine if America captured the man whose evil deeds against Bosnian Muslims the term “ethnic cleansing” was coined for. The radicals, jihadists and even moderates who are leaning towards hate would have to take pause.

Did Huff Post not understand what they and I were laughing at when they helped me nail Lantos? Do they not understand that this guy is saying the same thing as Lantos? That aside, what part of the word “jihad” do Huff Post and Lantos not understand?

Richard Shepard recently received an Emmy nomination and won the Director’s Guild Award for the TV pilot of Ugly Betty. His newest film, The Hunting Party, starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard, tells the true story about the hunt for war criminals in Bosnia. It opens September 7th.

Ah, so this is the director of the film whose working title was “Spring Break in Bosnia,” which I’d written about for FrontPageMag.com earlier this year. The one about the hunt for exclusively Serbian war criminals in Bosnia. Not a hunt for Bosnian Muslim war criminals such as Naser Oric, who shows guests videos of his “greatest hits” against Serb civilians. And not a hunt for the Croatian war criminals who raped and burned alive Serbian teenagers in the Battle of the Medak Pocket. No, just the Serbian war criminals who were reacting to the slaughter of more than 3,000 Serb villagers by the Muslim residents of Srebrenica.

If Hollywood filmmakers had any originality, instead of making another propaganda film, they’d make a movie exposing the hoax of Srebrenica — or even one showing how Srebrenica’s Muslims were ambushing Serb villages and slaughtering Serbs, young and old, along with any and all animals there for years before their “safe haven” was finally overtaken. That’d be totally cinematic, no? It would have been perfect for Halloween season, competing with Rob Zombie’s release this week of the remake of the famous “Halloween” series.

So September 7th is the date that the next round of recycled anti-Serb mythology starts up in our tireless efforts to make love to jihadists at the renewed expense of the always expendable Serbs.

At least the title of Shepard’s movie is apt: “The Hunting Party”. After all, it’s been hunting season on Serbs for decades.

CNN’s credibility-challenged Christiane Amanpour finally finished her lame-ass six-hour series on world religions, doing the usual number of digging up a Jewish would-be terrorist in prison since 1984 to show that Jews are just as terroristic as Muslims. She also lied to viewers by saying that the West Bank settlements are illegal; she had Carter plug his latest anti-Semitic tract; and she did the requisite bad-mouthing of the Israeli lobby. Asked whether her Jew-hating stems more from her Britishness or her Iranian-ness, she replied, “Hey, I’m no anti-Semite! Don’t forget — I MARRIED a kike!”

I love that magazines have a lag time, known in the industry as lead time. It refers to the time between the month that an article is written and the month it hits newsstands or gets to subscribers. In the May/June issue of “AAA’s Travel’s Companion” titled VIA magazine, six essay finalists were announced for Triple-A’s 2007 Dream Vacation Contest. Readers were asked to submit essays about their dream vacations, and 1,800 readers responded. While the finalists were chosen by judges, the winner was to be chosen by readers; the six competing essays were printed in the issue. The third one, written by a teacher named Chondra Winger in California, caught my attention:

He loved the United States before he set foot on American soil. He had seen American soldiers ride through the streets of Macedonia, bringing peace to a land ravaged by violence. Then Kujtim arrived, a 16-year-old exchange student enrolled in my English class. I shared Capote and guacamole, and he, in turn, described his mother’s bread, Albanian hip-hop, and the lights of Skopje. Soon my husband and children welcomed Kujtim into our family. We reveled in his stories of complex Macedonian-Roman ruins gazing up at a newly democratic skyline; mosques and churches flanking the Vardar River; a confluence of cultures cradled by grape-studded mountains. My husband and I could see ourselves there, weaving through the Old Skopje bazaar and dodging into a dark cafe for Turkish coffee. Just as Kujtim loved America before laying eyes on it, so we came to love a place we had never been.

Again, this was the May/June issue of the magazine. May was the month that we found out Albanians from Macedonia were plotting to kill American soldiers at Fort Dix. Nothing like timing. Indeed, it would have been a good time for Mrs. Winger to ask Kujtim why Albanians are trying to sever parts of Macedonia for themselves in their supremacist Greater Albania project.

May was also the month that VIA readers were to vote for the winner from among the six final essays. The September/October issue of the magazine has just arrived, and it announces, “We have a winner!” Guess who.

That’s right: the month that the Ft. Dix news was in full swing, readers selected Mrs. Winger’s rhapsody about the Albanian student from Macedonia to be the winning essay. While I appreciate that readers may have been touched by the pro-American overtones of the essay, the term Stockholm Syndrome comes to mind. So does the word suckers.

For a prize, reads the magazine, “[t]he winning essayist will receive his or her dream trip from AAA Travel, which is celebrating 60 years of granting vacation wishes.”

Let’s pretend we’re in “The Price is Right,” and give the Wingers a sneak peek of their dream vacation, from Chris Deliso’s book The Coming Balkan Caliphate :

Another fascinating case of what is happening now can be seen in Macedonia’s southwestern town of Struga, an ethnically mixed tourist destination on Lake Ohrid whose civil administration changed from Macedonian to ethnic Albanian control….[P]ermission was given to remove a small Ottoman mosque, which had been built over a Byzantine church, replacing it with a huge, Saudi-style mosque…Built very close to a hotel on Struga’s placid lakeshore, the new mosque’s well-amplified minaret blasts out the call to prayers five times a day, something that has irritated local non-Muslims and, significantly, foreign hotel guests. As a manager at one hotel on the shore opposite the mosque sadly conceded, “the European tourists coming for a quiet vacation get jolted out of bed by the noise coming from the mosque…and don’t return.” When asked whether such a policy was fair to non-Muslims, an imam at the Islamic Community of Struga…suggested that music wafting from cafes in the evenings was equally offensive to Muslims.

Hopefully if the Wingers visit Struga’s beach, they won’t have the experience that two Macedonian ladies did in July, 2006:

a Wahhabi fundamentalist group from a nearby village converged on a beach close to the Struga hotel. The unprecedented sight of 100 bearded, fully dressed Islamists gathered on a Macedonian beach seemed both outlandish and frightening. According to one young Macedonian woman who was there, “I and my friend were the only two women on the beach, surrounded by these Wahhabis. They were staring at us, and we felt nervous and decided to leave. What is going on? Are we living in Saudi Arabia?”

While in Macedonia, the Wingers should make sure to visit Skopje’s Gazi Baba neighborhood and pick up a must-have souvenir, one of those Chechnya jihad videotapes that are circulating there. And hopefully AAA won’t be thrifty about the hotels where it puts up its winning essayists, or the couple could end up staying on the same floor as Kosovo-based jihadist Samedin Xhezairi, who has networks in Skopje and utilizes “innocuous facilities like cheap hotels as logistics bases.”

Fortuitously, the September issue of VIA with its announcement of the lucky winner was released just as seven inmates have released themselves prematurely from a Kosovo jail in an armed breakout, at least one of them headed to Macedonia to destabilize the country in the event that Kosovo’s independence is compromised.

The Wingers had better get a move on this dream vacation if they want to return in one piece! The question is, if they decide to take a side trip and visit next-door neighbor Serbia’s Kosovo, will AAA be there for them when Albanians start shooting at their rental car if it happens to have Belgrade plates?

A report earlier this year cited 45 internet café bombings in Gaza since December 1, 2006:

About 45 Internet outlets have been bombed since Dec. 1, according to figures from Gaza’s Central Police Office…A group called the Swords of Islamic Righteousness has claimed responsibility for the attacks.”
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“This just shows how confused these fanatics are,” said [bombed Internet Cafe owner Alaa] Al-Shawa, 27. “Even they use the Internet to circulate their statements, but they think everyone else uses it for porno.”

Imagine: There you are, just minding your own business downloading bomb recipes and beheading videos, and boom! How is a person supposed to concentrate on becoming a jihadist with these constant disruptions?

An explosion ripped through a car east of Gaza City late Thursday, witnesses said, and hospital officials said one person was killed and another was seriously wounded.
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The Israeli army, which customarily acknowledges its air and ground operations against Palestinian militants, denied involvement. Some blasts that do not involve the military are caused by explosive devices intended for use against Israel that go off prematurely.

I love the glibness of that last sentence. Did someone write that with a straight face? Meanwhile, about all these “premature” explosions that happen (like, every month) to Muslims on their way to blow up Jews, do they ever stop to think that maybe that’s Allah talking to them right there? Does it ever cross their minds that maybe Allah is just not that into them?